Pre-Sale House Wash — Holyrood Street, Hampton

A pre-sale wash is not a maintenance wash and the deadline is what makes it different. A maintenance clean can happen the week after next. This one had to be finished before the photography and the first open, and once those dates are set they do not move. The standard changes too. Day to day, nobody looks at the top corner of an eave or the inside of an upstairs window. A buyer standing in a room looks straight out through that glass, and a listing photograph shows every cobweb the camera can find under a gutter line.

Walls first, the full way round rather than just the elevations that face the street. On a sale the back of the house appears in the photographs as often as the front, and a buyer walks the whole block. Cobwebs came off as their own pass. They gather in the corners of eaves, under gutter lines and around downpipes, and they photograph far more clearly than they read to the naked eye. Then the glass, inside and out. We normally work outside only, and this is the exception the job type earns: interior glass is what a buyer looks through when they are deciding, so leaving it half done would have been visible from the first room. Paths and driveway last, once everything that was going to wash down off the house had come down.

• All external walls washed, every elevation rather than the street frontage only
• Cobwebs cleared from eaves, gutter lines and downpipes as a separate pass
• Windows cleaned inside and outside
• Paths cleaned
• Driveway cleaned
• Finished ahead of the photography and the first open

• House consistent on every side, so the listing photographs match wherever they were taken from
• No cobwebs left where a camera picks them up under the eaves
• Glass clear from both sides, including the rooms buyers stand in
• Paths and driveway done in the same visit, no separate booking
• Whole property finished inside one working day